Holy Shit.

I think blizzard really needs to take into account just how drastically hearthstone can effect some players moods. Worst for me was last year when I was going through some severe mental illness, social isolation whatnot and hearthstone was basically all I had going on in my life. I'd just subbed to my favorite twitch streamer and I finally had the motivation to push for legend.

She adds subs to her battlenet so my goal was to get to rank one 5 stars while she was streaming and then have "rontu" has just attained the rank of legend!" pop up on her screen and she'd stop and be all "wow! that's so awesome, it's only the seventh!" and I'd be all mock humble in chat and brush it off and I'd end up offering to coach her on stream and I'd be very helpful but gentle and constructive with my tips and we'd develop a flirty back and forth....and well I think we've all watched enough sappy hollywood romances from the 30's.

Part of the issue was I needed to play "honest" midrange or control decks like renolock or priest, rogue etc. cause if she watched one of my games and saw I was just playing face shaman it would kill my mystique. I was a rogue expert in arena so I figured that was my best bet.

I started obsessively watching Ryzen and MrYagut streams and was full on eye of the tiger with training. I finally started laddering and just got beat down by wave after wave of aggro shaman. I still tried to keep up my resolve and have a positive attitude but it was all shattered when I was just about to eke out a win when the shaman played finley into warlock hero power and then held a spell till rope at my face which turned out to be lava burst for exact lethal.

I just lost it, I tried to add him but he ignored me, I googled his name and the first result was a twitch account. He was streaming live! The guy looked like a parody of a bro gamer, almost like a Nick Kroll character and he was laughing his ass off while bm'ing me then yelled "get fucked" and was all "that's how we boys, that's how we do" to his 14 viewers.

I was so mad I was close to passing out and after looking at the email and info in his twitch bio it wasn't very hard to find his real identity. A little googlefu and I had his apartment address and holy shit, he lived less than 300 miles from me!!!

10 minutes later I had packed a bag and was on the phone with a bus company, I have a bit of aspergers and tend to raise my voice when excited and was probably screaming at this point. I heard "sir please calm down, I can't understand you" and I glimpsed myself in the mirror and saw the crazed look in my eyes and realized how insane I was and I dropped the phone and started laughing hysterically until I was on the floor crying. After about five minutes of gigglesobbing I felt much better and my head was clear.

I have no idea what I was going to do when I showed up at his door, all I know is I had a brain full of anger and a duffel bag full of knives. I'm better now and saw a government appointed psychiatrist for 3 months until I fell in love with her college aged daughter...which is uhh nevermind haha, suffice it to say I'm on medication and have dealt with a lot of deep rooted issues. There has to be thousands of hearthstone players out there though who are even more mentally unstable than I was and if the day comes where there's a news report about a murder scene with the phrase "thank you" written all over the walls I'd be lying if said I didn't feel some blood was on Blizzards hands.